Co-pending U.S. patent application Ser. No. 13/754,866 entitled “Method and System for Key Generation, Distribution, and Management”, which is hereby incorporated herein by reference in its entirety describes the use of unidirectional encryption keys where each node in a network generates a receive key which is advertised to a central controller for the network over a secure control channel. Said controller in turn is configured to advertise the receive key to all other nodes in the domain.
In case of unidirectional keys, each node uses the same key to encrypt traffic to a given node. However, there are cases where, for the sake of increased security, there is a requirement for pair-wise keys between certain nodes.